Meanwhile, in the Hackintosh area, the 1201N has finally gotten it's own official thread over at Insanely Mac- 209533. There is now a bit more information up front about the state of OSX on the 1201N. Not much changes, no networking at all unless you swap out the WiFi PCie card.

Pros
- 4GB of RAM
- Plenty of disk space
- Smaller size

Cons
- No wifi after sleep, or sometimes after disconnecting from network
- Short Battery life
- Can run Omnigraffle
- Funky trackpad

The biggest issue with the Air is the the measly 80GB hard drive, it just isn't enough space. Upgrading it in this 1st gen Air is not financially feasible, as the HD costs as much as the 1201N itself. Not having Omnigraffle is forcing me to go back to the Mac for that one app. So far OpenOffice has been great at editing the various file I'm forced to deal with at work.

I stumbled across and amazing free ebook recently- DroidMaker (the link takes you to the authors blog, where he's release the PDFs). The story is an amazingly detailed history of the formation of Lucasfilm and the evolution of what became Pixar. I done some 3D modeling and rendering in the past (using Lightwave) and it's amazing to realize that these guys literally had to invent and write this stuff as they went along.

I was initially trying to convert the PDF to an ebook for reading on the iPhone, but found that nothing will convert a PDF nicely-- but that is for another post. What I did find is that the MacAir itself is a really nice ebook reader if you rotate the PDF to the right using Preview, and then hold the Air open on your lap like a book. It's small, light and thin enough that it really makes a great reader.

Is it time to give up on iPhoto?

How-To: Truly reset your .Mac sync data

I've been in search of a quick, simple and modern image editor for the Mac. For far too long I've been dragging around Photoshop 7, simply because I know I can use it to quickly do what I want. But what I need to do is limited. I want to resize and scale photos, add text (watermarks) to them and maybe overlay one or two. Maybe take a PDF and rasterize it to a thumbnail. I deal a lot with screenshots and adding hi-lights to them is about the most complicated task I ever need to do.

I've looked at the Gimp for OSX and recently Acorn (which seems totally alien to me- couldn't get it to do the most basic things) and have been frustrated, till today. Banging away at google I hit upon Imagewell. The people at XtraLean put this app out, and it is exactly what I was looking for (and it works fine in Leopard). It has a crazy price (free for basic stuff- and what it does for free is amazing) and is only $20 bucks to unlock the more advanced features.

It easily passed my acid test- I was able to download it without a bunch of questions and i could use it right away. I pulled in a PDF and was able to quickly resize it to the size I needed and save it out as a png. Very easy and intutive. Intrigued, I went back to their site and looked around the Forums and stumbled across their concise and short screen casts, which quickly illustrate the cool things you can do with this app. I think I'll buy this one and can leave Photoshop 7 to finally wither away.

Trying to get my mysql environment setup on 10.5 I ran head-long into the mysql python 1.22 drivers breaking with xcode 3.

from _mysql.c:40: /usr/include/sys/types.h:92: error: duplicate ‘unsigned’ /usr/include/sys/types.h:92: error: two or more data types in declaration specifiers error: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1

The fixed is coved over at the Ingels 3.0. fairly simple fix, but due to my complete lack of c programming skils, one that I couldn't have come up with on my own. But edit a few lines and it complies fine. Thanks Ingles.

Take that apple!

See Apple Keyboards Compared to Old Keyboards at circa1978.com.

"the heavy work done these past weeks allowed me to design a new experimental module where NewtonOS instructions are executed natively on ARM PDAs. "

There have been other improvements to Einstein since last year- the biggest (to me) is the ability to cross-compile and build Einstein on your Mac while targeting the Nokia 770. No more waiting for binaries to be released. The 800 was tested and the binary didn't run-- ITOS2007 has some different libraries (from ITOS 2005 and 2006), which probably caused issues. I'm attempting to roll a build for my 770 this weekend. We'll see how it goes.

Here are my screen shots of my 770 from the release of Einstein last year.

Also announced was the release of Driver Labo, the wifi drivers for Newton by Hiroshi Noguchi. AFAIK, these are the only available drivers in the world that support WEP on the Newton. I had purchased licenses back when they were available, but since 2005 Hiroshi hadn't ever responded to requests and pleas to accept payment for new licenses. As a result many Newtons can't participate in locked-down Wifi networks. The release of these drivers as Open Source is a welcome event.

There is an overview of the WWNC '07 with some pictures of course.

Word around was that Apple introduced a new version of iSync with 10.4.9, and with it the promise of direct OSX support of the V3m. And Apple did add support for the V3m model to iSync, but they didn't add support for the Sprint version! It still wouldn't pair correctly with a fresh install of 10.4.9 and my razr.

Luckily however, Clockskew has been keeping pace with his excellent iSync plugins. He has recently introduced a forum, where he stashes his latest downloads for his plugins as well and support for them. The forums help, I'm sure, as individual emails to CS don't benefit other users.

I had some issues with his earlier plugin (my post here) but this one seems to work OK, with some reservations. It won't work when you choose (in iSync) to erase device and sync, which is what I wanted, as I don't trust that it won't just dupe a whole bunch of contacts in my Addressbook. iSync started to clear the existing contacts from my phone, but but quit claiming it couldn't delete them. Upon looking at my phone it had deleted all contacts save one, and thought it may be that one sticking up the works. However, when I manually deleted that, iSync still wouldn't complete the erase and move on to the merge, until I manually changed the 'on first sync' option in iSync to just merge data on device and the Mac. Which wasn't an issue now since all the contacts on the phone had been deleted.

I have yet to try the calendar syncing, since I keep most of my important calendar items on Entourage. I still have to enable the Entourage/Addressbook, iCal syncing that Entourage has introduced.